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Gamified #118 | ON THOUSANDS.TV!
Recorded: May 21, 2025 Duration: 2:10:15Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. What's up everybody we'll get started in just a second we're going live on thousands.tv
as well if you want to join us for a video stream dub is going to be playing some far
arcade games in addition to the usual madness that is an episode of Gamified.
So it should be a lot of fun.
We're also going to be giving away $500 in guns and $500 in Wolf, courtesy of Thousands TV, which is exciting.
We're also live here in London.
So we're doing all of it on one PC, which is about as messy as it sounds,
but it's going to be a ton of fun. And I hope you guys will join us both on Twitter and on thousands.
Sarah's trying to set up some additional lighting for us
Just hit me with the strobe light
Fucking banished me to the shadow realm
Tony, I'm trying to add you up, brother
For some reason, Twitter isn't having it
So feel free to maybe leave and come back.
We'll see if we can get you back on.
Oh, it looks like it might have worked this time.
Oh, my God, I made it.
Can you hear me?
God bless the Twitter demons.
Oh, my God, I'm demons. Oh, my God.
I'm here.
Yes, I did it.
Thank you, Elon.
So are most of you guys in London right now?
Or are most people still sitting at home?
Where's everyone at?
No, literally everyone is out at a party right now.
But, you know, with Gamify calls, 9 p.m. showtime, sure. Let's do it.
I'm actually on my elliptical right now because I know how much Sam likes that when people join the show from their elliptical, so.
Do I have to get on my non-existent elliptical, too?
You just know somewhere
You just know somewhere Charlie Blackstock's out of breath.
Charlie Blackstock's out of breath.
4 a.m. here
and definitely not on an elliptical.
Knock and Koji,
I'm shocked you guys showed up after having
to entertain me and Dub in Canada
for like six consecutive days.
I appreciate both of you, your kindness, your generosity, and running it back yet again, flattering.
Yo, if you guys are ever questioning Sam's like degen nature, just know that he stayed at a hotel on top of a strip club.
That's all you need to know about, Sam.
It was unintentional.
If you look up the Fillmore Hotel, it looks like a real hotel.
Okay, I'll die on that hill.
This was not my fault.
We didn't visit the strip club.
We just stayed above it.
We listened to their incredible music until four in the morning every night
as we were trying to be rocked off to sleep.
And look, this is what happens with false advertising on the internet.
He just had to wake up every hour to pay for the room.
I took an Uber to go visit them, and the Uber driver was chirping me the whole way there.
there. So it sounds like a good experience. All right, guys, let's go ahead and kick off
God bless.
So it sounds like a good experience.
with some introductions. Again, come to thousands.tv and be able to participate in some rallies,
earn some wolf and some guns. It's going to be a ton of fun. But up first, from Victory
Road to Virtual Vaults, this battle-tested trainer brought home four titles in the Fortnite
League, earning his place among the real-world Elite Four.
I had a different intro written for him on a different Canva board.
His training regimen is tougher than Dragonite scales,
and now he's pivoted from power-ups to pixelated profits,
mastering NFT placement at Magic Eden like a Pokemart.
He's got the badges, the brains, and the battle passes.
This might be the first time I've ever been first.
Fucking excited about this one
let's go god bless me and uh me and dub are fighting over the touchpad because he's playing
games on the farcate at the same time that i'm trying to go through the intros it's it's it's
tough out here yeah uh we wish we could afford a second device uh but unfortunately it wasn't in
the cards up next brace yourselves for a financial firestorm. We're talking
millions juggled like they're flaming bowling
pins. Budgets that would make a dragon sweat
gold in a personality that could ignite something between
a garbage fire and a supernova. Prepare yourselves
to meet the personality that can melt your motherboard
from Glitter Cloud Solutions, the incendiary
innovator, the human flamethrower.
It's Tony V.
That's my flamethrower sound. Thanks for my flame flurry sound.
Thanks for having me here, guys.
Flame on to the panel, says Tony.
Up next, from crits to crypto, this former sharpshooter has leveled up and evolved.
He's got a master ball mindset and a megastone strategy.
He's planted the rare seed that bloomed in the Glitter Cloud Solutions, along with Tony V,
a consultancy super effective against the stale GameFi.
He's the king of the killstreak and the current farcaster phenomenon on the farcade.
It's dumb.
Yeah, honor to be here.
Surprise Sam as it kicks me out of his life by now.
We've been attached at the F for way too long.
Excited to get out of his room here in a second.
Yeah, guess who stayed at that strip club with me?
It was also dumb.
Not guilty, Your Honor.
Up next, he's a 30-year Titan of Code, a world builder of mythic proportions,
and he has the rare honor of working on a game inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.
He's forming the fabric of play.
He's a parallel pioneer holding court in the top 30 in a master of mechanics and metagames.
Recently, he stepped into the spotlight with the Project O Invit at the wolves den shout out from coin games and project oh it is
kevin lambert thank you sam that intro had 10 times the energy that the projects uh the my bags
and crypto this cycle so i appreciate it yikes we're all we're all in a tough spot.
Up next, building my angry Yakuza girlfriend.
He's a behemoth of bold tastes and brazen taboos.
The Renaissance rebel that strikes fear into the peasants and the gutless wanks alike.
A towering titan from the Far East looking to establish a gaming legacy beyond what we've seen in the Web3 West.
He's the titan of taboo, the founder who can't be bought.
It's Sinjin.
Good afternoon, morning, or wherever the hell you are let's eat some souls today boys it's engine you're uh you're not the only person up at four in the
morning we've got another special guest here joining us from the far east as well that i'm
excited to get to in just a second but up first he's forged in the fiery furnaces of smash tournaments
where he's dishing out more else than a dys dyslexic librarian. This guest has leveled up, blasting his way through the wet three war zones like a bull in a china shop.
This ox doesn't believe in beauty sleep because he's too busy stampeding over the competition.
He's the overlord of opportunities, the sultan of Smash.
From Avalanche, it's Wills.
And that's dyslexic librarian off my Sam intro bingo card.
I've got three more to go on this row and then I win
something. Amazing. Jerry, unfortunately, out for the time being. He will be here in just a little
bit dealing with some personal stuff. So heart goes out to Jerry. Looking forward to having him
on the panel in just a few. Up next, though, he's an original gangster of gaming, a guru of guild
building and a practically prehistoric power player in the crypto creation cosmos. He's the dude who developed a digital
dominion with Yield Guild Games, and now this pioneer of play is launching a new legend,
a mobile masterpiece of mirth and money, LOL.land. Get ready to go, go, go like a certain board game,
but this time with the power of pudgy penguins. He's the big boss of the blockchain,
the granddaddy of guilds,
the one, the only, it's Gabby Dazon.
Good morning.
Did you just call me prehistoric?
I said things about your legacy.
We're just going to move past that, Gabby.
Appreciate you coming on, man.
Up next, we have the man who once navigated the treacherous tides of transactions at square making sure every scallywag secured their share of spoils
then a cash app he wasn't just absolutely amazing he was a fintech freebooter forging a fortress of
fiscal fanatics and now he's the potent product pirate the leafy legend leading the charge of
pirate nation hoist the mainsail of monetary magic and give a hearty ah product pirate the leafy legend leading the charge of pirate nation hoist
the mainsail of monetary magic and give a hearty ahoy for the admiral of assets the fantastically
fronded it's fern best one yet easy to get better and better thank you sim i do what i can and i
wasn't able to get all of them originally written today in time for the show,
so I'm sorry to the reboots among us, but appreciate each and every one of you guys.
This one as well, unfortunately, you can tell it's a couple weeks old, but this man is what happens when Charm Underlevel Charm meets Dragonair Tear Drip,
weighing into a sleek 2.4 pounds, is Trailblazing Tail flinging,
slithering straight to stardom, Lizard is clapping claws and saluting
the flinky serpent of the spotlight.
The little is the legend is Lemz.
GM, GM, what is up?
And, you know, the Pokemon ones will never get old for me.
It's, you know, it's near and dear to my heart.
Love you, buddy.
Up next, you've got to prepare to ascend to the peak of innovation with Avalanche,
the official blockchain of Gamified.
With possibilities as high as the Himalayas,alanche allows you to own your digital everest where your community
plants its flag and your own token fuels the climb so whether you're a seasoned sherpa or a curious
climber come explore the avalanche of opportunities plus find us in london right now if you're in town
i was actually just getting dms from people saying oh my god i'm in london we should hang out
absolutely we should let me know i'm. I'm here. I'm here.
I'm at the Pullman.
Come find me.
Up next, these aren't your run-of-the-mill developers.
They're architects of growth.
Building a better landscape for Web3 Gaming.
It's Game 7, the official infrastructure of Gamified.
They've got an incredible toolkit from Summon to Hyperplay,
which is your fast lane into Web3 Gaming, making it a breeze to discover and dive into new games.
Shout out to Game 7, the infrastructure innovators,
making it all come together.
And today we have Dub on Thousands.TV playing into new games. Shout out to Game 7, the infrastructure innovators, making it all come together. And today we have Dub on Thousands.TV
playing Farcade games.
Farcade is the official game studio of Gamified today,
and it's making your game development dreams come through
by offering no-code opportunities
for you to build and distribute your very own creations.
Thanks to Farcade for being the official game of Gamified.
And we're also giving away that $500 in Woof
from Wolvesdow and $500 in Gun from Off the Grid, of gamified. And we're also giving away that $500 in woof from Wolvesdow
and $500 in gun from off the grid, courtesy of thousands.tv.
Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Make sure you jump over there and rally with us.
There's going to be sort of a red and blue situation
where you guys can put in your credits
to decide what you think is going to be the winner.
So in this case, we're talking game closures,
the first topic of the day.
Hold on, Sam. Hold on. Did you skip me?
Is it because I outed you?
Yo, Tony, check those Glitter Cloud receipts.
If there's some erroneous charges,
it's because Sam and Dub were engulfed in their own Glitter Cloud,
if you know what I mean.
I mean, I just want Dub to paint Sam like one of his French girls.
You're right, Koji.
There's no excuses for this, except for all of the jabs that you've taken at me and my wonderful selection of hotels.
Koji, of course, the king of parallel, the savior of Web3 gaming, the NFT titan, and the funniest person in
Web3 that I know. I also have his address. So, you know, be careful. Be careful, Koji. We're
talking game closures over under 30 more this year. In just the last week, we've seen several
studios shutting down Nyan Heroes, Rumble Kong League, Blast Royale, Ember Sword, just to name
a few. Trevor, the Ronin creator, dropped a list of a bunch of 2025 closures.
There was over 15 titles on it already, and it did include a bunch that have come out over the last few days.
A couple of them, like Jungle, are pivoting to Web 2.
This can be a brutal reminder, of course, how tough the gaming business is in general,
and then you add Web 3 to it, it's even tougher.
So the question here is, do you think over under 30 more Web3 gaming studios closing down?
The red is going to be the under and the blue is going to be the over on thousands.tv if you're voting along with us.
Koji, over to you first.
Over under 30 more closing this year.
I mean, I'm going under only because I can't name 30 others.
But I do think that there's going to be a good
number of closures. Like, I think this is, it's like a two pronged thing, right? Like,
we are in a space where a lot of teams dev out in the open or at least release products before
they're, you know, fully baked, but which is kind of what we've agreed upon with the user base,
with the community.
And as part of that, you kind of let you get to see behind the curtain a little bit.
And with that comes like things closing before they're ready, because in Web 2, you know,
there's a lot of games that get canned that you'll never hear of because they never even
make it to market.
Right.
And a lot of the games that you're playing in web 3 in the web 2 world
would never have made it to market so you wouldn't have even known about them uh but that being said
like you know i i had this conversation with sam while he was in toronto but uh i feel like uh you
know there but for the grace of god go i it's just like if if ever people lose interest in in parallel
or whatever all the things we were building or even worse than that
Like we have a bunch of players, but we can't convert any of them to paid players
Like that's that stuff can happen, right? And then like just another one will bite the dust
And I think this is like part of the natural lifecycle
We're just it impacts us more because there are fewer of us in web 3 and we get to see it more
It's more public. And so we think it's we get to see it more. It's more public.
And so we think it's a bigger deal than it is.
It's just kind of par for the course.
Absolute banger take from Koji to kick us off.
I want to go to Kevin Lambert next, then we'll tag and knock.
Yeah, I would say, same reasoning.
I don't know if I can name 30, but I would definitely say there will be more than 30 Web3 projects shutting down.
So I don't know if that counts or if it's specifically games, because I don't know if there are 30 Web3 games that we've all heard of.
But, you know, I think another piece that that's due to, to piggyback on what Koji said, is, you know, a lot of these games were spun up in the euphoric stage of the market when in the trust us bro culture, where it was just like, you know, with a with a pitch deck and a show rather than tell state and the teams that are willing and able to do that are much, much fewer, definitely fewer than 30, I would say.
So, yeah, we're probably going to see a lot of closures in Web3, a lot of promises that just weren't able to find product market fit, which is not necessarily that the that the ideas were bad it's just that
the teams and the execution weren't ready for the you know ready to to find that but the put but on
the other side of that the when the ashes come and the phoenix rises out of that the games that come
out of this phase um have the potential to be excellent and i'm looking forward to many of them
just to be clear since we're doing these rallies,
I do need you guys to take a side
so that we can know which side of the rally won.
Under.
Okay, both taking under,
but off the basis of maybe not having enough games, period,
which is not great.
I do think that there's more games out there
that are maybe subsidiaries,
or they're under the umbrella of a bigger title?
And then they kind of got moved on from I could think of five off the top of my head that fall into that category.
Maybe the studio isn't shutting down, but they're stopping production on the game like Overworld from from exterior.
Let's go over to Knock and then we'll tag in Fern.
Yeah, it's it's going to be over,
and it'll be over by quite a significant amount.
I mean, every year for the last four years,
more than 30 games have shut down.
Whether or not you know anything of them
is utterly irrelevant.
There are tons of Web3 teams
that have pitched themselves as building games
and raising money based off of an NFT sale
or a token sale or whatever it might be.
The teams that have been listed are the teams that have been most public. And to Koji's point,
are teams that may be a little further along. Maybe they've sort of leaned into the ethos that,
you know, hey, we build in public here. So maybe you get early insight to things,
things that you probably wouldn't see in traditional Web2 space, but way more than 30 games of closer doors every single year in crypto over the course of the
last couple of years. There's no reason why now in a year where most teams haven't raised money
in two or three years, the market is muted. NFTs aren't doing all that great right now.
Way more than 30 teams will be shutting their doors. And I'll, I'll even, I'll even add to this.
I'll try and track some of these smaller teams and see if we can do
something here,
Sam,
towards the end of the year where we put together a comprehensive list.
But I would imagine that that number is probably between like 40 and 50
teams overall that have stated that they're building a web three game.
We'll shut down or give up development on that title over the course of the
next six
months knock has taken the firm over let's go over to uh fern and then to tony v um yeah i'll
take the over um so startups are really hard crypto is really hard gaming is really hard. Gaming is really hard. And if you layer all those things on top of each
other, you get, you know, crypto gaming in an industry where I think there's been very few
successes so far. There's some that have been coming closer, you know, but they haven't like
really been breakout successes yet, at least on a long-term scale. I will say that I dislike the grave stomping that
I see. These are people who are putting their time and effort into building real companies.
And yes, there are ruggers and there are bad actors out there. And we should shun them and
kick them out of the space. But for the most part, everyone is really trying their best to just build a company.
And entrepreneurship is really difficult,
especially when you're on a frontier technology.
And so the only thing I would ask,
I said over,
I'd also ask for some grace
for the people who are actually building these companies
because they're humans.
Yes, you see a tiny little picture on a screen,
a post on Twitter.
There's people with lives and families on the other side.
And it doesn't feel great
when you see people celebrating failure.
That's not what we're all here for.
We're here to build the future.
We're not here to mock each other
when we don't succeed at doing something extremely hard.
Always good to remember there's a human on the other side of the internet.
Regardless of which side you find yourself on.
Let's go over to Tony V.
Then to Lems.
Yeah.
I'm going to take the over as well.
And fuck all those people.
I'm going to take the over for a different reason.
I think that one of the things that we haven't talked about is like, we're not
talking about, you know, X number of studios closing, um, in a vacuum and like no new studios,
you know, spring into existence.
And I think, you know, Sam, you're leading marketing for a company that I think is going
to be changing the landscape in regards to how many games are able to be shipped in a year. And I think we're actually going to see like a light speed acceleration
towards fast failure in a way, you know, Adam, that I think feels a lot better than the way it
does now, because I think the resources that it's going to cost to fail are going to be a lot,
a lot lower as well. But I do think that we're going to see the birth and death of a lot of game companies that are one or two people that are able to spin up a prototype and raise $50,000 from friends and family and go try to make a game.
I think there's going to be hundreds of those in the next couple of years.
And so, yeah, I think we're way, way over.
Way, way over. That puts over at a slight advantage three to two here i'm going over to lens that we're tagging his bang
yeah i couldn't slam the 100 emoji enough when knock was speaking there because
you might not have heard of them but man there are a lot of like teams and projects that have
been in web3 um i minted a lot of shit back in 21 and two.
And even like just yesterday, I was clearing out discord servers and the amount of servers
I was leaving that I was like, this thing's dead.
This thing's dead just cause maybe it didn't announce that it was dead.
They were just like basically gone silent.
Embersword was one that came out like yesterday and the amount of people I saw were like,
Oh yeah, I forgot that thing existed.
Like there's countless examples of those and people have just minted assets or
whatever. And then they've forgotten about it.
And there's been no comments from them. So yeah,
definitely going to be over.
I think Adam's point was really good too as well.
Like we need to not just be grave stomping.
Like the way people are on the timeline, it's like,
it's pretty toxic right now. This like mentality of like, Oh, it's like you,
I told you so kind of thing. And like in hindsight,
and it really doesn't do anyone any good. It's like, Hey,
this industry is like pretty rough. Gaming is rough.
It was really good chat in Wolves and Friends as well.
The telegram group of like, Hey, like if this was in traditional gaming,
like a lot of these games would never get to their publisher milestones and they would just never see
the light of day. Everything is in public here. So we got to just keep that in mind.
We often talk about like, you know, 95% of startups fail, but now we're just living it
and getting to experience it where we thought like everyone thought their bags would make
it. But like the sad reality is that's just not a realistic uh outlook
great take from lens i want to go over to fang then to kevin lambert
yeah i'm gonna go the over can you guys hear me
hello oh you're back you're back okay yeah i can. Okay, cool. I'm going to take the over on this one.
And I think for all of the reasons that people are saying as well, but I think the reason
that we're talking about this and the reason that this has become a talking point over
the past few weeks is because there's been a major shift in what people are seeing as
success in this industry.
A couple of people have alluded to the fact that,
you know, a lot of these projects were founded in the 2021-22 era, where we were seeing crazy
stuff happening, as Kevin said, with a pitch deck and a website, and also importantly, a token,
and a token price that went to the absolute moon. Like it still baffles me to this day
that Illumium hit what, like $1,400 for nothing at all.
They just didn't have anything.
And now they have some mediocre games,
but they haven't really done anything with it.
And that's why a lot of people got into this space.
And I think we're still kind of seeing the remnants
of that ideology and that as the idea of
success and what we're doing this for kind of really starting to peter out. And I think the
reason that we're starting to see this peter out is because we're seeing what large, established
and successful players and the results that they're getting. We're seeing guns, we're seeing MapleStory come out with their TGEs and looking at these
charts and being like, huh, this is just stable.
That's not a hockey stick.
This is a stable chart that isn't really going anywhere and is kind of just sitting where
it needs to be based on the way that the community is interacting with it and how people are engaging with the assets. And that is helpful for gameplay purposes. And this
is what we're going to be seeing a lot more of is these stable economies with not L-stick hockey
growth that we came to expect back in those days. And I think that a lot of teams are looking at
that and going, oh, well, if this is what massive multi-billion dollar
corporations are seeing and we're basing our results on getting, you know, 100x on 2GE,
this isn't going to be feasible for us. Yeah, it's a great point. The landscape is changing
and so are the sort of standards and opinions that we're seeing from people where it's becoming a lot
more about like, hey, maybe we should have a full-fledged game out and a stable economy before we introduce a liquid token. Or maybe
we don't introduce a liquid token at all. Spang hanging behind from AVAX Summit so that he could
drop bombs like that remotely. Let's go over to Kevin Lambert, then to Sinjin.
I just had a question. Is the measure for this just out of the panel here? What are the votes? Or is it is there actually a measure like, hey, we're gonna be able to check and find out how many of these studios close because I was going by actual measure. But if you had said, like, what, what is the group gonna think here? You know, I probably would have changed my vote.
know i probably would have changed my vote so the rally on thousands is for what the group thinks
here but in general we are voting on what we think will 30 or more shut down between now and
the end of the year so the next uh six months based on what we've seen so far sinjin over to
you yeah um i think obviously it's for me it's uh like the whole industry is just basically going down the tubes as it is.
Right.
But I want to say that and put it in perspective that this was always going to be the outcome in the situation that we are.
Because, you know, what were we really building for?
So I want to say that, like, do I still believe that Web3 Gaming is inevitable?
And like, are these closures like affecting that viewpoint yeah i think like web3 gaming is absolutely still inevitable and it doesn't affect my viewpoint at all in terms of what these closures
are representing and just to give like an example is that I think some of the were like around the 2005,
can you believe that there were like 150 to 200 active online poker websites that were
all making money that were in the market at that time?
Like 150 at one time.
Okay.
And you could have gone to this site called pokerscout.com. It's still around. But
if you go there, you're going to see like, maybe like, I don't know, like 15 that are really active
at this moment, but only about like four or five that are actually, you know, making money and
that have survived up to this point. And, you know, with all like the innovation or all like
the fundraising for certain types of games and stuff like that
the reality was always going to be that we're always going to end up with just a few winners
so for me like this was fairly inevitable as well uh but that doesn't take away from the narrative
or you know the direction of what the industry is going for and that is you know something really
special so yeah my heart goes out to like all the studios that have
closed down or that will close down they're having a really rough time because the market is just
crazy and if the studios can raise at this time like wow what a miracle for you guys um but yeah
I think you know it's it's definitely like way over it sounds like the over is gonna win I i i have to say singin yeah i agree i've heard
of a few people raising over the last couple of months and every time i hear that they're able to
do that in this market it really does sort of put a stamp on that group and and say they're building
something special if they're able to do it now uh so congratulations to people on the blue side of
the rally over 30 games is the consensus of the panel here.
We're moving on to the next topic of the day.
What's the word?
Claire Obscure Expedition 33
and the insane amount of success that they've been getting.
The game has sold over 2 million copies
within 12 days of the launch.
It's been closer to three weeks now,
which is six times the estimates even a few days ago
surpassing industry expectations.
Despite this being a
turn-based game, it's a game that people don't usually like in this genre because it's like an
active turn-based game. There was one feature that I keep hearing over and over and over again,
which is this parry feature in particular. And the parry feature is uh something that you have to do again actively so
the a character is coming at you you have to hit it right just the right moment you can kind of turn
the tides of these fights that you're in uh otherwise so the question here is true or false
that one feature is responsible for the bulk of the success that the game is seeing so true being
yes it's just because of the parry feature.
False being, there's actually a lot going on here,
but the parry feature is the unique thing that people are pointing out.
That's going to be the rally.
Blue is going to be false.
There's lots of things going on here.
Red is going to be true.
It's just the parry feature.
That's what's unique.
And what's the word for the success that we're seeing
out of this turn-based surprise that we've seen?
I'm going to go over to Nock first.
The word is inspired, man.
This is, if you haven't played it and you have Game Pass,
just try it out, download it tonight.
It's fucking incredible.
I would say false.
It's not only because of the parry, but the parry helps a lot,
and it does pull a lot of the weight.
The idea behind this game sort of spawned out of a
dev who was tired of the uninspired stuff that came out of ubisoft spun out spins up this so his own
dev you know studio puts out this game i think it shocked a lot of people they went to market in a
way that was pretty unique and in the way that it was delivered they went to a bunch of creators who
started getting their hands on it this This game spreads through word of mouth
a lot more than any game I can remember in recent history.
And the parry feature really does add a lot
to the turn-based style games.
Somebody suggested that it might be something
like a Fire Emblem or like early Final Fantasy.
And I didn't really understand that.
But you jump into the game,
you have this turn-based
system there's a really beautiful story the world looks incredible and then you have this active
moment when you're actually competing in combat where if you time things correctly you do way
more damage your combos are insane you take almost no damage if you get a bunch of perfect parries
it is a really engaging twist on a genre
that i think a lot of people historically stayed away from because they thought it was boring they
didn't want to go through this turn-based strategy they didn't necessarily care or feel anything about
that type of type of gameplay but when you add in this parry mechanism it does add a lot to the game
and you couple that with the inspired design the story the the overall
atmosphere when you're playing this game and it feels unlike anything that we've seen in quite
some time um blue prince is another game that came out just recently that also has a lot of this like
very inspired feel of it it's it's just nice to see two double a teams sort of leading the charge on
game of the year candidates i think the word is inspired.
I think false.
The parry does a lot for the game.
It absolutely adds to it.
But even without that mechanism, there's just so many good things in Expedition 33 that I still think it would be one of the front runners for Game of the Year.
Awesome stuff.
Thanks for the clean answer there, Nakh.
Let's go over to Gabby from YGG and Loll. Also, Gabby, is it Lawland or LOLland?
You can call it Lawland.
All right, Lawland it is. Gabby, over to you.
All right, so I've been playing the game, and it's definitely not just because of the parry feature. I think this type of game is something that just doesn't get approved over at the big publishers these days.
It's a combination of a really great and unique story.
Parry definitely helps, the characters are interesting, the skill trees are interesting as well.
There's a certain French player about the entire game the graphics are good the characters are actually
funny and uh yeah there are certain elements there that you've played in other games and
definitely the turn-based gameplay is not something that people aren't as used to anymore
but combine all of that into just a package that is just so marvelous and wonderful to play
i love that too in the category of there's more to it than just the perry feature let's go over
to koji then kevin uh yeah i mean definitely uh there's more to it so i would say it's false that
it's just the perry um yeah i mean i think the word is inspiring as well like we see it with a
i mean we forget sometimes that video games are art and and we see it with like
a movie like sinners or something right it's like okay we've seen the vampire
thing before but it's all of a sudden it's like holy shit this is like this
guy did it in a way that like is new and fresh and amazing and exciting and like
the same thing with turn-based combat now I will say knock you're exposing
yourself as having never played Super Mario RPG.
If you think that this is the first game that did this shit, how dare you, sir?
But I will say that like it's been a while and even in Mario RPG, it wasn't sort of like showcased as like a core feature of the game.
It was just like a nice little add-on.
So I think to like have this mix between turn-based combat
and some sort of active style is amazing.
Because I played the Final Fantasy VII remakes
and some of the other more slightly active combat games,
and I hated them.
And I think this is done on a surprising new level.
So I think we're going to see a lot more where this comes from.
But again, I think like when it comes to art
indie stuff can surprise you right like it's blueprints is another great example i think that
like as long as people are doing new fun interesting things it doesn't matter i mean this game is also
beautiful but even if it wasn't beautiful uh it would still be a contender for game of the year
so koji it sounds like you're a a false do you think there's more than just the parry system
that played into the success here yeah yeah yeah definitely false all right that's three oh heavy
handed kevin over to you this should be a hundred percent it's not just the parry um yeah not just
the parry false uh easy i was also going to bring up super mario rpg and i thought i had my hand up
before koji damn so now i'm gonna have to follow. I think you did too, and I'm
glad that I got to front run you. Yeah, yeah,
you did. It's all good.
Yeah, the
turn-based, I've played so
many turn-based RPGs,
like, practically all of them
from the old console days, right? And a lot
of them have that additional spice.
I think the thing
that players, like, when this is up for
game of the year and you're reading all the reviews about this game the thing that will be
most commonly talked about is how fun the combat is if you don't enjoy the combat you will not like
this game but you will enjoy the combat because it's awesome um because it is it's turn-based
with spice and the the spice is the you, it's got the peri mechanic,
the dodge mechanic, a little bit of that,
which is really interesting because in these games,
they're like, well, if you think about it,
you don't actually need health or defense, right?
Because you can just learn the fights and perfectly time them
and not take any damage for the entirety of the game.
But it takes time to do that,
so you invest
into health and defense while you learn you know but you could just grind them and never take
damage right so it's just it's a really interesting gameplay mechanic that rewards skill uh so much
and you don't just you don't see that in turn-based rpgs very. So it's a fresh mix of those, you know, combined with the great story,
skill tree, the progression.
There's a, you know,
I have two complaints about the UX
related to the Pictos
and you can't preview outfits on your character.
I'm like, wow, how did that get by?
But like outside of that,
the game is absolutely incredible.
I do think it's a game of the year contender.
And if you had said, do you think it's the combat that's gonna make this primarily responsible that would have been a far more tough question because it's really close but i think it's
the full package and if you have not played this game you must it's uh it's gonna probably be up
for game of the year with With these Super Mario RPG references,
I feel bad for calling Gabby prehistoric.
Clearly, it should have been Koji and Kevin Lambert here.
Let's go over to Nock and then to Spang.
Yeah, one of the things that I think is most exciting about this
is that this is the type of game that only gets greenlit
by a small studio like this, right?
The lead developer of the studio specifically said it himself.
I left Ubisoft because we weren't doing things like this, right? Like he, the lead developer of the studio specifically said it himself, like I
left Ubisoft because we weren't doing things like this. I felt boring and stale and I wanted to
create something that was a little more exciting. And I think in a world where AAA developers are
consistently competing to build the next forever game, something that has a little bit of something
for everybody, a lot of the times what you get is not enough substance for anybody.
And that's why we've seen so many AAA titles flop
over the course of the last, let's call it five years or so,
when titles like Expedition 33 are coming out
and it's really meant for a pretty specific audience.
You have to have some background in this style of game.
You have to have at least some experience,
because a lot of the people that I know, at least anecdotally,
that didn't play turn-based RPGs
or are unfamiliar with these types of combat systems,
they still don't quite get it,
despite thinking that it's a really cool game and it looks beautiful.
But for the people who have played it,
it's the most refreshing thing that's come out in almost a decade.
So I think it's really important to support studios like this.
So we get more inspired games like this because we've just been fed slop
from the AAA studios for the last 10 years.
Great take knock. I want to go over to Kevin or sorry,
to Spang and then back to Kevin Lambert.
Hell yeah. Okay.
I've been waiting this whole question because i get to
jerry today and say that absolutely it is the parry uh because as someone who does not typically
play turn-based games and i think that what we're hearing is an from the super mario crowd of you
know turn-based rpg enthusiasts is that it's a innovation on the turn-based RPG enthusiasts,
is that it's an innovation on the turn-based RPG genre,
which is great.
But as we know, being in the space that we're in,
it's not about just improving it for the people that are already there, but bringing new people in.
And this is a full-price game, so it needs to have a hook.
And I think what is hooking people is the So it needs to have a hook.
And I think what is hooking people is the fact that it does have a parry.
Granted, I have purchased the game, but I have not played it.
But the reason I purchased it is because I heard it had a parry.
Because we're in the parry meta.
It's not just Claire Obscura. It's Doom Eternal.
A fast-paced first-person shooter has implemented parries it's one of the
coolest game mechanics that you can put in a game to to immediately make a player feel skilled and
engaged and i think people are finally coming around to that and so you know i can't speak to
the overall quality of the game and you you know, what really makes it special.
But I can say as a consumer that what was able to push me over the edge when I had played games like Baldur's Gate 3 and not had, you know, a 10 out of 10 time, a good game, just not my kind of thing.
But it was the fact that it had a parry and it and it reaches that
whole new audience outside of that and that's what i think is is really excited about it the
fact that it had a parry influenced my decision so much i was fully willing to look past the fact
that this is a french studio i mean that that says a lot i love it dude honestly the french jab aside which i may or may not agree with i i i totally
agree that there's more to the the quality or the engagement of a game that has this parry system
because you kind of just hit the button and like afk mentally while it plays out and you watch the
pretty animations a lot of the time but it's one simple element of like i've got to time this
perfectly and all of a sudden you're like leaning forward engaged in gaming mode being like i gotta lock in it's a
boss fight it just elevates the entire experience let's go over to kevin lambert and then fern had
the hand up for a second might be down now yeah it's worth noting by the way since you haven't
played it um for those who haven't played it uh there is dodge and parry the parry and uh they are both ways to avoid some attacks some can't be dodged
and things like that but uh uh the timing window for the parry is very tight and it's really great
because when you try so normally what you try to do is you dodge and then if it says perfect then
you know you would have also gotten the parry and you're like oh sweet my timing is perfect i'm ready
to do this but dodge is a wider window so you cannot get hit while you gotten the parry, and you're like, oh, sweet, my timing is perfect. I'm ready to do this. But dodge is a wider window, so you cannot get hit
while you practice your parry.
It's really excellent.
But since you said, is it just the parry?
I assume it's not the dodge and all of the timing-based, right?
But the whole combat system is, you know,
I think the people who say false are saying it's about the dodge
and the parry and the skill based timing, which is what I heard just spoken about what was great about it, not just the parry itself, although the branding potentially.
But I raised my hand back to mention one additional thing I forgot to say, and that is like in the last five to 10 years, I've really started to pay more attention to the DNA of these game studios.
Like who at the executive leadership team is building these games and where did they come from and what's their superhero powers?
And when you see, you know, mostly they're developers or business finance marketing people.
That's like 90% of the game studios you see.
Occasionally, you will see a DNA of an art studio.
Like these are like Moon Studios
who made Ori and the Blind Forest as art DNA.
Limbo, Inside, those are art DNA studios.
This studio feels like it has some art DNA
and you can see it and it's awesome.
And I love to see those games.
They feel fresh, like Hi-Fi Rush, another one of those studios.
You know, then you get, you know, studios that have like game design and UX DNA and, you know, the superhero power shows in their products too.
Always love to see those guys as well.
That's a great distinction there, Kevin.
Let's go over to Fern.
I put my hand down because I'm like the worst gaming leader in the world
I don't even know what this game you're talking about
it's like just so not
on my radar at all like my brain is
consumed with like food and film
I raised my hand because someone shouted out
sinners and I saw it last night and it
was epic. Oh hell yeah let's talk about
movies. Yeah I just want to
say everyone should go see sinners and and support auteurs getting large
budgets so more movies like that get made. And that's what I came to say.
I don't know about this game. Maybe I'll look it up later.
Koji's love language is people watching movies with him. We watched two while I was in
Toronto with him. Okay, we're moving on to a quick fire. FIFA
rivals now on the books along with NFL rivals.
NFL rivals has done about $12 million in marketplace volume.
It's generated $5.4 million in revenue in 2024,
so it's not even including the last few months here.
They've got about 5 million downloads
and about 2 million NFT cards minted for the game.
The question here is, Quickfire,
will FIFA rivals surpass nfl rivals
why or why not and uh yes or no so that we can uh measure the rally here so yes is going to be
the blue team no is going to be the red team will fifa rivals surpass nfl rivals koji i'm tagging
you in first uh yes it will because when you say football to anyone outside of America,
they think you're talking about FIFA, not NFL.
So, yeah, I think that it'll definitely surpass.
Knock, what about you?
The easiest yes we've ever had on this show.
There are like two countries on earth that have nationalized football leagues
and they both play different versions of the game.
And then you have Germany and Japan, who happen to also slightly care about american football beyond that nobody else gives a shit soccer is the biggest game on earth by a wide
margin this is going to crush nfl rivals which was a success in its own right but i think this
will destroy it i'm going to dub in real life yeah Yeah, that's a big no way, Jose, on this.
I was actually at my first European soccer match talking to the fans live about this topic.
And they told me I was full of shit and to just watch the game.
So I'm pretty sure none of them are really going to be interested in this whatsoever.
FIFA rivals already shit the bed with their existing gameplay.
So they already have toxic and ruined their existing
player base so they're going to come in
trying to attract new users
that aren't even interested in the first place
so it's a clear no here no matter what you're
saying about how big
football is compared to football
that's a weird argument
to be fair when we were at the movie
the person behind us told you
that you were full of shit to stop talking.
So I don't know if that's a new thing.
On this last episode we did, Doug, weren't you the one saying how you hope they've figured out all the problems from NFL rivals and you're so bullish on FIFA rivals and then it went out a week later, you've just flipped on your head?
Yeah, I mean, you got to listen to the people at the end of the day.
And the local Brits here have a clear expectation on quality, and we're nowhere near it.
Wow, Dub switching sides faster than something that's fast.
Over to Tony V.
Every time I'm on this show with Dub, I question my decision to found a business with them, but it's clearly, FIFA is clearly going to crush NFL rivals in revenue.
Like, I mean, having worked at EA on the FIFA
and the Madden products, like, one of them makes
a bazillion more dollars than the other
for all of the reasons that everyone just said.
But, like, there are just, like, no French people buying NFLfl products and there are like lots and lots and lots and lots of french
people buying fifa products right as just an example of one country i think someone mentioned
japan as like a fan of american football i don't i don't know that i agree with that as a as a
statement either i'm just gonna throw that out there it's not super germane to the conversation
but like i don't know they have like a nationalized league and plenty of d2 shouldn't be any american players go out there
i mean sure but maybe there's like 20 of those people but i don't know if i believe you
hey what about the cfl right those guys those guys gotta not even care about the cfl man the
best quarterback in the cfl is a qb who couldn't make a roster that literally had no other QBs.
Hey, hold on, hold on. Don't be smirched Doug Flutie, though, man.
He was the all-time dope.
He played before you were born.
All I know is you're saying it's trash, but somehow there's still enough people watching it to support the entire league.
At some point, those fans have got to go, I'd like to watch real football and go to the NFL product, right? That's what we do.
As soon as we get a team, as soon as Toronto gets an NFL team,
then it's all over for the CFL.
That's why we don't have one.
Spangler, tagging you in.
I'm going to say it's going to be bigger because, you know,
as we've seen with Claire Obscura,
the Euromind virus is just absolutely winning at
the moment uh and i i believe they will continue to do so as long as french keep putting parries
where they're not supposed to be
doug hype in the comments says is the only person here that plays nfl rivals fifa rivals is gonna
have a real live pfp pvp system and it could be much better, but who here will play it?
It depends if the new system is actually good as usual.
Many things hang on that barrier there.
Lambs over to you.
Yeah, definitely.
It should succeed.
And if it doesn't like exceed NFL rivals,
then I would assume mythical will treat it as a giant fail because i'm sure
getting that fifa licensing was not cheap and five million downloads like yeah it kind of sounds like
a lot from nfl rivals like but on the grand scheme of things for a mobile game it's not like that
many and the global audience of actual like soccer football i feel like it should be a no-brainer
and if they don't then they majorly
fumble the bag doesn't matter what dub says by the way fumble nice uh well done lems all right
real quick ad read uh during the ad read if you're watching on thousands dub is gonna try to play
to five or sorry for five minutes to 15 if he can beat sh and nft by getting 15 points, then the blue team will win.
If he can't, then the red team will win.
He's been fighting for his life. He hasn't got past
11, so I'm trying to give you guys three points
here. For the love of God, you know what to do.
But in the meantime, hold on to your
helmets. Avalanche is the king of gaming chains
and the official chain of Gamified.
Come see us in London right
now. The summit is absolutely epic. There's another
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Conquer the cult with the cutting edge technology in the community.
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Bundle up, bring your A game, craft your very own L1 to service all your blockchain gaming needs.
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Come and join the digital nation and get your citizenship so you can level
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Thank you to game seven for being the official infrastructure of game.
Dub is currently at eight.
He's losing his mind.
And today,
of course we have to play a far K games on thousands TV as he dies.
Not even halfway there.
Far K is the official game studio game.
Fine.
It's making your game development dreams come true,
offering no code opportunities for you to build and distribute your very own
creations.
Thank you to the Farcade.
We're also giving away $500 in wolf,
$500 in gun from off the grid,
courtesy of thousands TV guns.
I'm so confused.
Every time I say it wrong,
it's plural.
Every time I say it wrong all over again.
And we're jumping into the very next topic.
We'll start the rally for this in just a minute while Dub fights for his life for the next three minutes or so.
Who's in the wrong here, the players or the game?
We've seen a lot of juicy complaints coming out of both the Cambria squad and also the MapleStory squad.
They just launched and are already seeing some complaints about earning opportunities.
People spending $10,000 and only earning $10 to $20 a day, and they're not happy about it. Drop rates also changed from
the test net. And some people are saying that you could make more money playing the traditional
MapleStory game with more content and just use the black market. So what are we doing here if
I can't make more money on the Web3 side of things? You also need a wallet to play.
So whenever you consider that friction that users have onboarding,
obviously there's some restraints there that people aren't so happy about
if they're a little bit newer to this.
And last but not least, we also saw Cambria distribute rewards
during the last event, which was incredibly hyped,
but then resulted in a lot of drama whenever it didn't really match expectations.
So the question here is who's to blame, the games or the gamers?
And as soon as that last rally ends, I'll give you guys the next one to kick us off.
But I want to go to Tony V first.
Tony, who you blaming here, the games or the gamers?
Definitely Koji.
But yeah, I think that this is a game's problem and not a gamer's problem.
I don't think this is a game's problem and not a gamer's problem. I don't think this is a customer's problem.
I have long held many people here have heard me say,
show me the money, Jerry Maguire.
And I think that is the most important part of this equation still.
I talk to the guys from Open Loot all the time,
and they are consistent that part of their core mantra is our players
make money the people who care about making money make money and i think that that's a really
important thing to balance with the game's going to be fun i think it's it's like when i say balance
i think it's like equally important and i i really believe that the companies that that are going to
be most successful are going to be the ones that have figured out like maybe it's not like maple
stories like hard up because their web3 audience isn't happy about how much
money they're making right like they're still printing money like a broken atm machine with
that ip and in my humble opinion they should be plowing a bunch of that money that they're
they're printing like a broken atm machine into their power users on the web3 on the web3 side
like that is the uh the the deal that you're signing up for if you're taking a wildly successful thing
that's making money and bringing it into this space where people expect for one of the features
to be, I make money if I'm really good at this thing or if I spend a lot of money in
And so I think that in this case, it's unfortunately hate the game, not the player.
And I love the IPs we're talking about.
So obviously, I don't think that anyone's really at fault here.
But I do think that the people that are going to be most successful are the people that take the money that they're making and say, like, this is how much we need to make for everyone to be happy at our company.
And then take everything else and cloud right back into their power users.
That's a strategy we've seen a lot from TikTok, Snapchat.
A lot of social media companies have done this
with their creator fund.
Dubb, if anybody's wondering,
still not even close to 50.
So they're pounding the under there.
Surprised to hear somebody blame the game out of the gate.
Tony, I appreciate that potentially divergent opinion.
Gabby, who are you blaming here?
Cambria, MapleStory, people underwhelmed
with some of the rewards they're receiving. Who are you blaming, the gamers or the games?
Yeah, good question. I do think that balancing the expectations of gamers is really hard.
If you're the game and you're trying to create a good economy, and let's just say that everyone is trying to create a good economy, right? It doesn't mean that everyone can earn money. And you have to create loops where a lot of people can earn maybe a small amount of money
and fewer people can make a lot of money. And just creating these loops and balancing them
and having real people go out and break them, challenging bots that are trying to siphon off
most of the money, all of that is hard. However, that is absolutely a game design problem.
So I would pin this on the game developer.
Wow, two for two on the game developer.
Blake, whenever we finish this rally up,
let's get it going.
So it's going to be the blue side
is the game developer's fault
and the red side is the gamer's fault.
It's currently 2-0 though.
That rally is getting pushed.
Fern, are you going to switch it up or are we blaming the games?
I'm happy to blame the gamers.
I mean, I know we're supposed to say the customer is always right.
But as when people say in a brainstorm, like there's no bad ideas, there are definitely
bad ideas. There are definitely bad ideas and there are also bad customers. So I don't know
bad ideas and there are also bad customers.
like the specifics of these drop rates because I haven't played them to, I've like messed around
at the border, but I'm also not playing these games for the purposes of making money. So I'm
not the target audience for this question. But I do think that gamers in this space sometimes have unreasonable expectations,
and it's not always possible to meet them. And so I think on the builder side, you kind of know
what people want. Some people want to play a real game. Some people want to play a real game,
make money. Some people just want to make money. And you have to decide who is your target audience
and how are you going to meet them where they are, sometimes there's things that are out of
your control, and sometimes there are things that you directly control. I have an anecdote from
Proof of Play and from Pirate Nation that two years ago, one of the hardest things in the game
to get was called a faded map. It was basically impossible to get a faded map. You need a faded
map to get a high-season map, to get a high-season map to build a ship. It was very
important for the game progression. It was really hard to come by. And so there were some people
who were farming them, who were selling them for, I don't remember how much they were going for,
and they were making money. Then we made a change to basically increase the drop rate for faded
maps. And it was a change that was net positive for the game
because it meant that people could progress faster.
They were less frustrated.
They were able to unlock more content.
It was just like a better experience for them.
As a result, what do you think happens
when you flood the market with supply
and you don't have as much demand?
We didn't increase player count accordingly.
You have oversupply and therefore prices go down.
So you have some people in the economy
and the game who are happy because they can now build their ship. They can build more ships faster.
And then you have other people who are pissed because they're not making money. And so
you as a game designer have to decide what's more important to you and which audience are
you trying to serve? And so the answer is kind of both, but you have to understand your audience.
But generally
speaking, I do believe that pretty much everyone on crypto Twitter, everyone in the space has
unreasonable expectations of like what is possible because there's a finite amount of attention and
money and just like game mechanics that you can put in place to make a number go up. And you can
introduce all sorts of Ponzi-nomics, but at a certain point,
like someone has to pay the piper. And so maybe they're reaching that point sooner rather than
later. Great take from Fern. I love the balance that you struck there. Let's go over to Spang
that I'm tagging in Koji. Yeah, I'm going to echo most of what uh what fern said because i definitely think that
there is an element i mean we were all just hyping up cambria a couple of weeks ago because of their
i think it was like 1.2 million a dollar giveaway and everyone's like this is awesome this is why
we play crypto games and then everyone shows up for that giveaway and everyone gets a little less and everyone's pissed. And it's like, it's almost like, I know that we're constantly trying to, you know, play this balance of, oh, we need to, you know, cater to, you know, all gameplay people and we need to cater to the speculative market as well.
But like, this is one of those moments where you really have people just putting their hands up and be like, I don't really give a shit how good the game is.
I'm just here to make money.
And I think that there's an element at which there's a certain point,
and I think this is that point at which you need to tell those people,
okay, this isn't for you.
At this point, if this isn't making you happy enough,
then go do DeFi stuff.
We're here to have enjoyable experiences and play games. And that's what I think these are focusing
on. And I think that, you know, especially in the MapleStory case, you know, it's balancing.
And, you know, we see this happen in games all the time. People get pissed at the balance patch.
And, you know, I think this is just gonna, we're gonna see this more and more
as we kind of mature as an industry and grow
and are able to see these kinds of changes implemented
for exactly the reasons that we were talking about earlier,
this ideal shift, because as we were saying
with the studio closures,
there's been a shift in what it means
to be a successful web three game.
There's also been a shift in what it means to be a successful Web 3 game. There's also been a shift in what it means to be a successful Web 3 player.
And a lot of players are having to figure that out now.
And, you know, it's do I have a definitive answer on where that line is?
But no, but we're starting to figure that out.
And I think that this kind of outrage, if you want to even call it that, is a symptom of these growing pains.
It's a great point there.
So it sounds like the last couple of answers have been on the side of the gamers are to blame and not the games.
I'll call it 2-2. Koji, over to you.
Anyone who knows me, this isn't going to come as a surprise, but it's definitely the fucking gamers.
but it's definitely the fucking gamers.
It used to be that to play a game,
you either had to like throw quarters
into a machine at the arcade
or spend like 60 bucks to bring a game home.
And then we got to the point where games are free.
And now we're at a point
where the games are spinning quarters back at you
and people are like, it's not enough.
If you don't have enough money, get a fucking job.
You know, like actually contribute
instead of worrying
about oh this game isn't paying me enough for it to make like to feed my family or whatever like
what the hell are you talking about man we're making toys it's supposed to be fun with an with
the cherry on top being you know if if you are having enough fun with it if you are jumping
through the right hoops whatever you get some reward back which is more than i ever got from
any of the games that i know life you know and and so people who are like oh this isn't paying me enough like get the fuck out of
here you know i and yes okay we have to design shit for everybody and you know everything everyone
said prior to me is like correct in some regard but like the people who are complaining on twitter
are definitely to blame because they're the ones who are going to, like, I don't know, create bots to farm the shit out of stuff.
Whatever.
The faded map example is a great example.
It's just like people are going to abuse the system, so we have to make a system that rewards less because of abusers.
If you want to get paid more for playing games, get rid of, like, kick the abusers out of here.
Like, shame them publicly, do all the shiters out of here like shame them publicly do all the
shit and then like maybe that can happen but it'll never happen because everyone's fucking greedy it's
the gamers that was a that was a spicy uh banger not surprised on the take but uh it was still
amazing to hear nonetheless kevin you're you're in the midst of of uh sort of designing this for
your game uh what's your take on the subject and also your
reaction to what Koji just said? Oh, man, this is my favorite topic, one of them. I'm going to give
a complex answer with a plot twist. I agree with all of the folks who said it's the gamers,
but it's the gamers because the game developers have created them. So it's the game developers.
It's the gamers because the game developers have created them.
So it's the game developers.
That's my final answer is it's the game developers.
You've created a monster, Koji.
This is your doing.
Dude.
Yeah, yeah.
We have created these people.
And since Jerry isn't here to razz me, I get a free pass on promoting my article on Web3 Gaming Personas
that touches on all of this and the behaviors and the psychological patterns and why people are the way they are. Anyways, but since he's not here, I'll mention
that. But like, you know, what happened here is, you know, people came in, it's up to the game
developers to set the contract of what the expectations are here, right? If you say we're
building a poker game and top 100 people money, then you have set that social contract and the players can decide if they want to, you know, greed for the money or
play for the fun or whatever they want. Or you can have an experience that allows speculators to live
over here and players to live over there and they are on either side of a fence, kind of like we're
doing, right? Lots of ways to slice this, but you can't really, like everybody,
like saying human greed is the problem,
blame the humans.
I mean, come on, like, what's the solution, right?
The solution is for game developers
to stop doing, to stop setting those poor expectations.
So that will eventually mature the audience
out of that place where the gamers are the problem
because they are
right but then we will stop creating them and uh you know it comes down to when people have
an expectation of if you know people are going to have an expectation of playing your game for
profit uh you had better have a design that sustains that profit in some way because I guarantee you and there is science
to back this up go look up the over justification effect once they get the taste of the nectar of
profits by playing your game they will love it and if for any reason that should drop they will
stop playing your game no matter how good it is so if you don't see that train wreck coming as a
game designer or game
developer then you will run into the same problem so you have to design around or with that fact
well hold on hold on i gotta push back on that a little bit because we see games like counter
strike and diablo and all these other games that came even before and after that have like
for money economies that the companies never
foresaw and people are playing those games for money like World of Warcraft is a great example
right and maybe you know the company is trying to stop it or whatever but like I think that's
part like it's part of gamer nature right you're seeing that already even if you're saying hey I
don't want this it's still happening yeah so to, oh, they should design around it is a little bit disingenuous,
honestly. No, no, no, fair
point. So I agree that you can have
it's basically like
how much of the game design
you make that. And in the case of Counter-Strike
and those like
emergent economies that
kind of came up where there's this grey market
or black market account selling and all that stuff
and people just flipping those things on the side, That's fine. But when you look like as a Venn
diagram of the percentages of people who are doing that relative to the entire audience,
it's very small and it's sustainable at that size. But if you bake that into the design on
the front page and entice people to come over for that reason and market it as the developer,
you're building a larger part of that pie which isn't sustainable,
and that's a problem of the developer.
Do you agree more with that, Koji?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, I don't think either side is totally to blame.
Obviously, I'm going to blame the side that I'm not.
But, like, yeah, I agree that, like, we, you know,
we both kind of play a part in the nonsense.
Great stuff.
Real quick, with this rally, Dub hit 12,
but he didn't get over 12 right as it expired.
So he's done nothing but lose to this point.
We're changing it.
We're lowering the barrier to entry.
We're now setting it at 10.
But this discussion has been absolutely fantastic.
It's so good that Tony's DMing me his opinion on the side because he can't wait to get it out.
So I'm going to send it over to Tony again, and then we'll go to Fern.
It's true.
I'm just harassing Sam here on Telegram.
No, I think that it comes back to Jerry Maguire.
It all comes back to show the fucking money.
And the reason is because all we're talking about here,
Koji, I really think, Koji, and I love you.
You know I love you.
But I think all we're talking about is the people who are making all of the money,
the people who make the games, I think the ones who are going to be more successful
are the ones who are willing to part with more of the money
than is currently the dynamic in the space and give it back to the audience.
And whether or not you're giving it to the fucking weebs who are crying on the timeline,
actually, I agree with you. Fuck those people. You shouldn't give them the money.
But I do think that it's incumbent upon the companies to build unscalable solutions to
reward the people that we should be rewarding, our true power users, until we find a way to
scale those solutions. It's on us to eat the shit and do the hard thing to spend the money to reward the right people
until we don't want to eat the shit anymore and we figure out how to make it scalable.
But I really do think that the conversation we're having is less like,
should we reward people bitching on the internet?
And more, like, what is the percentage or what is the amount of riches or money that if you make a AAA game or a really successful title, you are willing to repatriate back to your audience?
Right now, in the examples you use, Blizzard's not giving any money back to their fucking audience, right?
Like that's not a thing that exists.
And so I think like somewhere between that and, you know, paying attention to the 50 people who are really sad about Cambria right now and enriching them is is probably the right answer is where i think we're gonna land so i i
agree with i actually agree with you tony like i we reward our top players obviously more than we
reward our you know lower ranked players and i think like that makes sense to me but those aren't
the people who are online being like hey you're you're not paying me enough. I agree. I agree. The question wasn't, is it the people bitching online or is it the game?
Is it the players or the game? And I think it's what I'm saying.
I think it's on the game to make it.
Because if we had 100 people out there that were the good people saying the opposite,
the dumb people just kind of wouldn't matter.
You know what I mean?
If we had really king-made people that were making as much money as they could be with the kind of money that these games are making then it would be like
the narrative wouldn't be the whiny couple of people i think we all have in our head talking
about how much money they're not making it would be frank who's not working at 7-eleven anymore
i mean fair but i i don't think like yarla in our case is going to reply to everyone who's
complaining about the the prime payouts to be like, hey, I made like fucking half a million dollars last year or whatever.
Like, that's not going to happen.
So, you know, I think like.
Not with that attitude, Koji.
Yeah, maybe if we pay more.
The vocal minority is the problem, I think.
I think this is a really great conversation.
One thing that I would say from my own experience,
I brought this up already, but Snapchat, TikTok,
these creator programs that we've seen on social media,
there's always this huge inbound of people that want to get paid.
And then it's the social media's job to essentially replace that motivation
whenever they get rid of the
creator program. So the TikTok creator program was famously like $275 million. And obviously,
it's really hard to replace $275 million with anything that's not incredibly extrinsic.
But what they did was by the time that creator program disappeared, they were able to replace
it with enough distribution help that it said, okay, well, you're not going to get paid from us directly, but you might be able to get paid
because you can say, I just got 30 million views or something like that. And I feel like part of
the problem is these creator programs or these hyper monetized seasons or whatever you want to
call them are so short. And there's usually you max out the content that you're playing to the
point where there is no replacement at the end of it.
It's just like either you keep playing the exact same content
without the monetary reward or you don't play anymore.
And that's not a very attractive alternative.
Spang, what do you think?
And then, sorry, I think I was supposed to go to Fern.
I'll go to Fern after. Spang, over to you.
Yeah, I think that the reason I put my hand back out
was basically to make the points that Koji was making
in response to Kevin of like, you know,
the argument that we're having right now
is the players versus the game developers.
But, you know, the people who are complaining online
aren't necessarily a part of that play account
that we're trying to appease.
And I think that that's the really important thing here is figuring out who
exactly,
who exactly your game is for and who you're trying to benefit the most.
Let's go over to Fern next.
Fern,
over to you.
Yeah.
I actually love that take from Kevin.
I wanted to jump in immediately.
Like we created this probably created a monster in a way. I mean, I didn't create a monster. I feel like Axie Infinity created a monster.
And then we just kind of like kept bolting things onto it a little bit.
And yeah, expectation setting is the most important thing. We've always, again,
pulling it back to Pirate Nation. We've always, we've never branded ourselves as play to earn.
to Pirate Nation. We've never branded ourselves as play to earn. We've intentionally and aggressively
and openly said it's not our goal to enrich the players through their gameplay. That may have
happened incidentally, but it wasn't the core focus of the game design team. Regardless, people
don't read or listen or they think you're like wink, winking at them. And because like everyone else
is, is doing that thing. And I don't think it's good or bad, but I do think it's, it's relatively
unsustainable. It is really difficult to balance, you know, as I've seen, I'm not a game designer,
but as I've observed over the past couple of years is really difficult to balance quality
game design decisions that make the game more fun against this motive, like motivation of,
of making money. And oftentimes they come into conflict with each other and you have to choose.
And if you're building a game and especially if your team is not like a bunch of like DGN,
um, you know, like, you know, casino builders, your, your instinct is to build the game.
That is going to be the fun thing.
And again, it's not denigrating the other option,
but a lot of people are in the space.
They've been building games their whole life,
and they're like, oh, I'm going to build the game.
And that doesn't always prioritize that other customer persona.
But yeah, we're just trying to operate within the confines of the space around
us which has been cultivated and built by a lot of others including us right we've been around
since 2021 so like we're we're also comfortable i'm unleashing the dragon i'm going to the titan
of taboo singe and eat their souls yeah you guys are all like really like this conversation is so elementary in some regards because it is
actually a very difficult uh you know uh topic because it's a matter of bad actors right so like
if you create a game um for bad actors okay um meaning that it's just for you know earning and
exploiting and stuff like that. Um,
then, you know, actually in order to even keep the game alive, uh, the game gets less and less
fun because you have to moderate the bad actors actions, which you've kind of put forward and
saying, okay, look, you guys are playing for incentives. You guys are playing for rewards.
And everyone is like, what we say in poker, like you're, they're going to angle shoot. They're going to look for every single edge they can get to exploit the system. And then
in creating and designing the game to make it less exploitable, right? You make it less and less fun.
Right. And then it's, it's no longer about a game per se. It's just a matter of like,
how do you game a system? Right right so the reason why i'm saying this
is that in in poker specifically um you know why do people play poker well they're playing it for
money to win but the way that you win the money is in this framework of enjoying the competitive
game of poker so in poker what ended up happening in the industry is that there's this very common term
right now we say like player ecology like what is the composition of your player ecology is it like
90 like sharks or is it like 90 fish sharks being like the players who really know how to play um
and what will happen is like even in a live game like if you go to bicycle club or you go to
foxwoods or whatever like that there will be like six players at a nine-handed table
who are there who will not play against each other.
They will wait for the fish to come and sit down
and they will just destroy the fish.
And the fish is like, what the fuck?
In my home games, I'm pretty good.
But I go to the casino, I just get annihilated
and I don't even know why,
not realizing that the six other players
are actually colluding against those three other players who sit down so previously in online poker what we
would have is like you could pick your room and what we had found was that these sharks would go
and they'd literally like literally hunt down these fish wherever they would sit and just totally
destroy them right so in some ways like if put like, and you advertise as your game,
okay, we're a play to earn game and here you're going to earn, right? You're basically making a
game for bad actors, right? But on the flip side is that you make a game that has some earnings
and it works, but it only works if the bad actors are kept to a minimum or the bad actors are like held in some kind of guideline so they don't destroy the actual player ecology.
I guess a big example of this is in NFTs is no royalty, you know, like blur and everything else like that that ended up happening was like people don't want trading fees, right?
So they don't want to like, I mean, they don't want trading fees
and they don't want to pay the royalty fees.
Okay. That's, that's fine.
And so you're rewarding in blur,
like just mass trading without any royalty fees.
And you're circumventing that.
But the entire industry was developed because the creators,
the graphic artists and everyone else,
they were getting these royalties.
And once you took it away, yes, the market became more efficient, but the core reason
for why the content was being made in the first place, the inspiration, the creativity,
the, you know, the, the aspiration of all of that was suddenly taken away.
And then the entire market just tanked.
Right.
And I'll say that the reason why it tanked was because then content was being made, not
for the
joy of you know sharing digital goods for that had ownership now was just basically started to
trade it as just whatever right and it lost its soul so you know it's kind of like the the games
are to blame if they are making a game for bad actors right and that's all that attracts but then the
players are to blame if you know they're here to just basically corrupt the game to angle shoot
as bad actors to do it and so at poker stars what we do is like um we would just basically ban
players right we would ban them for basically bad behavior or for doing so on and so forth and they
would say well this is part of the game like it just so unfair. But if we let the bad players or the bad actors run amok,
they will literally destroy the whole ecosystem.
And then there would be no game at all, right?
So it's a very, very nuanced thing.
But for the most part in Web3 with the play to earn,
it's definitely the game's fault
because they promote bad actors.
But for most other games, even if you try to design for it, you just can't do it because the game would no longer be fun.
It's just like you're playing a game and like, for instance, in rugby, okay, we say rugby is a gentleman's game and soccer or football is a hooligan's game.
The reason why we say that is because like rugby is a super violent sport
right i mean like it is a brutal brutal sport and if we did not play like gentlemen when we played
rugby it would just be a brawl every single time right so the game is designed that you have to be
a good actor to play or the game is not, it's not completely unplayable. Right.
Whereas in football, the, the, the sissy sport, right.
Like it's designed so that, you know, like, like, you know, you can't really be a bad actor.
So like, if you're a bad actor, you kind of get away with it because you're not really,
you're not really getting injured.
Right.
Oh, I sprained myself.
Oh, I fell down, you know, like this guy like touched my head or whatever like that so you know it's nuanced but in web 3 um i would actually say it's it's the game's
fault because they promote bad actor behavior and for that reason fifa rivals will not overtake
nfl rivals uh great points that was a banger let's go over to Lems then to knock all right expectations expectations
expectations and I mean this on both
sides of the fence here like
I'm not really going to
straddle the fence a little bit I will lean
more on the game developer side
as being more in the wrong but it's also on the gamer
side so on the game dev
side there's setting expectations
too high for people. And then
we've created this culture, which other people alluded to, of the expectation from gamers of
getting ridiculously outsized rewards or everyone being rewarded. And I'm going to just pull it
from these examples here. MapleStory, I'm not as familiar with the Cambria whole debacle. I read a
lot more about and talked
to different people about what happened the maple story like it kind of comes down to the fact people
were saying they can just basically play the old traditional maple story which is richer in content
and just deal with the black market and they can make more money playing that way as opposed to
buying overpriced assets which again is the problem from the web three side and not getting much out of it.
So that's like bad expectations management there again, from the game dev side of like, Hey, you
have like high prices for assets. You can't get a lot of token out of it. And then changing drop
rates and stuff like that pisses everyone off. But the Cambria one, like that one, what really
got me was a lot of people were just saying the, and it's a fair point, like Koji kind of alluded
to it
earlier of hey you're playing a game anything you get is a nice reward and while i fundamentally i
agree with that statement the design in some of these systems is so piss poor that it incentivizes
the total wrong kind of behavior in the cambria example and people just kind of like threw it out
of like oh people were just pissed they didn't get enough money.
But really, it was actually the way the design structure was why people were pissed to play
the game.
A lot of people said they enjoyed the game, but they were just really pissed off that
there was this big reward pool.
And what did they reward?
The mindless grinding of the farming of the game, as opposed to like playing the game
as one would expect to play an MMO.
So, hey, like spending money to upgrade your character getting all these upgrades on gear they basically rewarded whoever hoarded the most currency at the
end of the event that's not the good way to like reward the game so that way you could afk farm the
game you could just do all the like meaningless like tasks that didn't take any skill whatsoever
and anyone who actually played competitively because they they didn't map out the whole reward structure.
They gave a high-level example,
which I think is better in Web3.
If you tell people exactly how their rewards are going to play out,
it's way easier for people to game the system.
But what ended up happening was people expected
some of the farmers and stuff to get burned,
and the people who played at a skill level
and played the PvP and upgraded the character
and spent all this money in the game
would actually get the most rewards.
But instead, they rewarded people who hoarded all the stuff versus people who literally spent more money in the game and played the game as you would expect to play an mmo and that's purely down
to bad reward design structures so if you don't design a good reward system i think it was like
kevin who alluded to it earlier like it all kind of comes back to that if it's not designed well
in the first place people of course are going to exploit it and be like, Oh,
I could play the game and do the more fun thing, which would be, Oh,
go and like upgrade my character and get to the end game. Oh,
or I'd make,
I can make more money by fishing and just having like an AFK bot.
Let me like fish constantly and just do this for the two week event. Boom.
Of course people are going to farm the shit out of that and try and
extract as much money as they can.
And all the people who played the game as the game was intended,
basically got fucked.
And that's really shitty.
And that's just down to bad,
bad design.
And those people should have been the ones who got rewarded more because
they had fun and they like played the game as it should have been.
Great.
Great additional context from when Dub is fighting for his life over here okay okay knock i'm going over to you then we're tagging
in synchew before we move on all right so much to unpack here so so bear with me first to to
fern's point about the um faded maps and whatnot i think anybody who corners a
market especially a market on an asset that is integral to game progression with the intention
of increasing the price of that asset just to make a ton of money off of those fuck those people i
hope every single asset that you have that you're trying to do with do this with also gets fucked up
in game because that is like the worst thing you can possibly experience you see this all the time with like merch clans in wow and and runescape
and then an update will come that makes that item less valuable and they complain like good get
fucked i hope that happens every single time you do this with an item i hope that item gets
fucked so that's like a weird side tension i think that there's there's a lot more nuance to this
that i think is being missed so on the side of cambria. I think that there's a lot more nuance to this
that I think is being missed.
So on the side of Cambria,
I actually think that the issue here
is on the side of players.
Most of the complaints came from people who said,
the way that I played the game wasn't rewarded enough.
Not fundamentally the reward system was broken
or I don't like the way that rewards were distributed.
The issue was I wanted to do this thing.
This thing didn't spit out as many rewards as I wanted that thing to spit out.
And now I'm going to complain about the fact that I did this thing
and it didn't reward me the way that I had hoped it would reward.
Overall, most of the rewards in Cambria were paid out to people
who took on the most inherent financial risk, i.e. people who were funding groups
and people who were taking positions within assets of that game, and they were rewarded more handsomely than the players
who were maybe running around killing other players for 14 hours a day. I don't think that
that is an issue in game design. I think that that is your desired behavior isn't the behavior that
is going to be rewarded the most. That sucks. It doesn't feel good from a player perspective,
but that doesn't mean that the design of the economy
is inherently flawed.
So I think Cambria,
there's a lot more nuance to it simply than,
you know, hey, we wanted to PK a bunch, player kill.
PKing wasn't rewarded in the way
that we had hoped it would be rewarded.
So therefore it was a terrible system
and it only rewarded farmers and stakers and people of that nature.
But Noc, is there any responsibility on the game developers for setting expectations around that?
100%. Absolutely there is.
But the issue here is less about whether or not I was rewarded or whether or not the reward structure was set up incorrectly.
To your point, Kevin.
I agree.
There's an absolute need for expectation setting, but fundamentally the problem that a lot of people had, especially on Twitter was the thing that I did didn't return the way that
I wanted it to return.
And I think that that is a bullshit argument and absolutely on the case of the players
Absolutely on the case of the players.
in the case of maple story.
In the case of MapleStory, this is a game that took to Web3 in a way to help,
their hopes here was to help alleviate some of the economic issues that they were seeing in the traditional Web2 title, right?
Part of being able to alleviate those issues is reaching scale.
They are not available, to Kate Irwin's point, yes, on Monday on Simplified, in eight of the ten largest gaming markets on Earth yet.
They clearly do not have the same player base.
Of course the economics of a new MMO this early on are going to be fucked.
This happens in every fresh wipe server that you've ever played in any MMO ever.
When RuneScape does it or when WoW does it, there are particular tiers of assets that are incredibly expensive.
As time goes on, as more people play the games, as those worlds become more mature, the price of those assets decrease.
So again, I can't help but feel that this is on the side of the players, maybe a little bit on the side of the game.
I think it's almost like a little bit of a no man's land in MapleStory because we simply put don't have enough players yet and have not had enough maturity of the server to see whether or not the economic changes that they made from Web2 are actually better.
Right. What we have right now is a very limited number of players playing in a fresh server, playing mostly financialized people who have to jump through the hurdle of downloading a MetaMask, connecting it to the game.
This game is in its infancy.
It is far too early to figure out whether or not what they've done
and the changes that they've made from their Web2 title will be effective.
So I think that this is more a timing issue than an issue on either side of the aisle here.
I don't think players are at fault for expecting better economics
because that's what this was built at.
I don't even necessarily think that the game was at fault for a poor economic design
because ultimately they're not online in the way that they need to be online for this to be, you know,
actually rolled out in a more holistic way.
So I think MapleStory, point to us, I don't care who you blame.
I absolutely believe that Cambria is on the side of the players. And I do think that we need we just in general need more time here. The last thing I'll say is it is absolutely hilarious to me how many people in this space in their 30s and 40s will say these kids never would have survived Modern Warfare 2 or COD lobbies on Xbox and then constantly bitch and complain about people being mean to them on Twitter.
It is absurd that Inhuman gets the amount of hate that people do.
I'm just using him as an example because he is soft by Xbox lobbies.
So you can either decide to give everybody shit for being a soft gamer today,
or you can complain about everybody being mean to you on social media,
but you don't get it both ways dude absolute banger mike drop moment at the end there we do
have to move on to the next topic soon but i'm gonna go to sinjin and then to tony real quick
yeah i'll just get some real uh some color on the maple story thing just because like uh being
korean i do uh follow some of the korean native uh native posters and stuff like that.
So this is really interesting with MapleStory, though,
because it's kind of a tale of two masters in two directions
because there are two prevailing criticisms that are happening,
and they're on two different threads.
One is the actual MapleStory players who do know how to play MapleStory and they're upset because the lack of content and the game itself doesn't seem fully fleshed out.
And, you know, obviously the way that the drops are happening, it's just like it's not an enjoyable.
It's not a matter that's not enjoyable it feels like an incomplete gaming experience and that they feel like the
economy side was put all this work to it but it wasn't blended into uh the game content enough
and then on the other side are really the the web 2 speculator web 3 speculator players who are just
like i'm i'm making like whatever they've calculated like 40 cents or 85 cents an hour this is such a waste of my time and you know um you know like i can't really grind uh there's no point to grind to this level
because you know you got to get to this point and then so like you know what's being like sold for
like you know level 200 characters um it's just not worth it and it's better just to kind of buy
it and so on and so forth and it's we're not really making any money from it and so like they have a really difficult situation because they've
designed their game or they've trying to design their game that appeals to solving the solution
that they that they originally intended for but also working off of you know the speculative
market in web 3 because that's what ultimately gives like this
kind of boost the value of their economy and the reason why so they are really in the middle of it
and i and i i just wrote uh i i think i quoted uh the the strategy uh designer for uh maple story
universe and i just said let them cook like they there it's it's so fucking tough this situation
like i mean like i'm telling you i'm from the poker industry i'm from the casino industry
i'm telling you like the thing about in web 3 is that like a lot of game designers have a lot
experience in game design they don't have a lot of experience in actual financial incentive real world incentive that's in the game yes they
have a lot of game economy uh what it called and i've pissed off some other game designers on this
like they have a lot of game design economy experience but not when it's actual financial
design that's touching within the game right this is a very very difficult my only feeling
about this is and this is how we've designed our game is not to go for the speculators at all and
to grow it organically until you get enough of the user base enough of the rails that are designed in
from where you see the player behavior then to kind of allow them to come in because they feel like okay there are possible ways to
earn here right but for us it's a complete risk reward element there's nothing free per se um in
the way we've designed it and i can say that even with all the years of my experience as a like a
real money game designer in poker and card games right this has been a pitch of a fucking task
i always love whenever sinjin brings the poker experience into the equation tony for a quick
word and then we're moving on i'll keep it real quick i just i just gotta say i think it comes
back to show me the money i think we're just all talking about a marketing expense you know you i
think all of the problems that you guys are talking about like if you just assumed as a
business you were like yep if're going to launch this type of
product and we like, again, I go to MapleStory, they have a lot of money to spend, right?
If I think that were I launching the way that they, the thing that they were launching,
I would just assume that I need to spend X millions of dollars in marketing to like, again,
do the unsustainable, unscalable thing. And like, again, drill down
into really rewarding who should be rewarded. And I think that like a lot of the theoretical,
like, well, I, I, I want to do this way or that way, again, could just be solved with money,
right? Like if you were saying, if they said like, hey, we have this much money to give
two people who are playing the game and we're going to like do it with you and learn, learn
how we should be rewarding people together.
Like, I don't know.
I, like I said, I think all of it goes back to, you can solve this particular problem
that we're talking about by throwing money at it.
And the only way to do that is by having a business that like works and is making money.
And that's where I think it comes back to like, not everyone gets to do everything,
right?
Like, I think that there's, you know, some businesses that can successfully operate in
the type of environment that we're talking about and some that won't.
Tony, I'll just say from experience, let's jump in.
Like, that's not right.
Because there were a lot of, you know, competitors in the poker space and they threw a lot of money, like tens of millions of dollars to compete through giving guaranteed tournaments and stuff like this and free rolls and whatever like that.
giving guaranteed tournaments and stuff like this and free rolls and
whatever like that.
And they just couldn't.
And they just couldn't,
I mean the,
the user base and how you design for a user base and what you've curated as
user base.
Yeah.
Like,
you know,
like they can be more scammy than you can be Sullivan.
That's all I got to say.
Well,
show me the money is the perfect segue into our next topic because the guy
who had his art stolen by Bungie for Marathon is
definitely saying show me the money right now uh how would you deal with this if you were the C-suite
it's been a little bit of a shit show since Bungie found out that uh apparently the art that they've
been using for Marathon their new big sexy IP that just had a big play test uh apparently artists on
their team stole the the sort of cornerstone art for a lot
of the style and design that is now making up the entire game.
This has led to an internal audit and a legal review of all the artwork for Marathon to
ensure that there's no more issues.
On top of that, there's been negative feedback from play testers about the state of the game,
which obviously doesn't help to pile that on top of everything else.
Apparently the devs have been largely ignored by leadership for about five years as far as what would and wouldn't work in the game especially needed for a PVE component.
So now testers are confirming that it doesn't feel good.
Quote unquote, the vibes have never been worse at the company according to some employees.
This has led to them pulling the plug on their marketing plan which is supposed to have a trailer launch in June and start pre-orders. And instead, they're delaying that while they
sort out a couple of these issues. So how would you handle this if you were in the C-suite of
Bungie? And would you either buy this person out to buy the art that was stolen from them,
or would you revamp the game to not include any of that art? I'm going to go over to Nock first.
I can't help but feel that this is sort of like a non-story, right?
Like, isn't this how the system is supposed to work?
Hey, we had a bad actor internally.
We've caught the issue.
We're going to run an internal audit to make sure that this issue does not expand
or extend beyond the thing that we currently believe that it affects. if it does we'll deal with it that way we want to make sure that everything we
do moving forward is legally tight like to me that feels like exactly how this is supposed to happen
yeah it sucks when an artist gets their art stolen i will never defend that from happening
sorry my dog with this fucking toy um but I think that this is exactly how it's supposed
to happen. Like, they found an issue,
they're trying to resolve this issue,
it sucks for the artist,
but this happens all the time. At least they've
acknowledged it and seem to be taking approach.
Whether or not that acknowledgement comes
because they've been catching heat on social,
before anybody says that, I'm going to front run this and say
it does not fucking matter. The point is
they've acknowledged it, they found an issue, they're trying to solve it. I think that that's what'm going to front run this and say it does not fucking matter. The point is they've acknowledged it.
They found an issue.
They're trying to solve it.
I think that that's what's supposed to happen here.
It's just that simple.
All right.
Tony D, what do you say?
Yeah, I agree with the sentiment that it's a good thing that they're taking the accountability that they're taking and they're saying all the right words.
I do think that it is a real show me the money situation though like i
think that like the easiest and and most uh like sensible solve here really is to be like hey
clearly your shit's good enough to serve as a you know significant portion of our game like why don't
you come work with us and and help us build this thing i'll i'll use uh crystal dynamics as an example i was working with them earlier this year they launched a remaster
for legacy of k in this vampire game that was real popular in the 90s and they they went and found
like the woman from fucking london that was remastering the game on her own because she loved
it so much and brought her onto the team and had her she's like a you know like a associate designer on the remaster and shit and like it costs them again it goes back to like show
me the money out of if you're making a shitload of money how much of it are you willing to give up
to like to like do the right thing and honor the people that are making you successful and i think
this is like clearly an example where the right thing to do here is for bungie to take like for
one of their
C-level people to make a million and a half dollar bonus this year instead of a million dollar bonus
or two million dollar bonus and give this dude a half million bucks and fucking hire him and have
him come do shit on the on the fucking team like I see the thumbs down knock but like that's like I
would be that transparent about it I would like if I was the fucking head of I was the head of
marketing there if I was the head of like art or whatever i would be like i'm gonna eat that shit sandwich yeah knock i was agreeing with tony nodding my
head in real life but obviously the thumbs down came in at the end there what gives okay so i
actually agree with like 99 of what tony said that last thing i i really strongly disagree with so
whenever somebody from a community shows this type of initiative i agree with tony this is an
opportunity to bring that person in.
Clearly, you're excited about the thing that they're doing.
It looks good.
It's a good PR piece.
It makes everybody feel good.
Great.
We saw this happening with people who were spinning up private servers for both WoW and
RuneScape.
I always reference this because it's the two games that I know best, but those people were
ultimately brought in to work on things like vanilla wow or classic wow and as well as like
old school runescape that makes sense that feels good it's a good story this idea that a single
rogue actor within the company can do something that then costs the company five hundred thousand
dollars i think is really dangerous because what ends up what could end up happening in a company
like this is hey koji's an artist i'm an artist who works at this studio koji steal some of that art. Two years later, we're going to go after them. You're
going to win a $500,000 lawsuit. That's bullshit. It opens up a massive can of worms that I think
is dangerous for the company's bottom line. I agree wholeheartedly with Tony's sentiment.
I agree with the idea that people that you take inspiration from or people that bring things into
your ecosystem should be rewarded.
You should hire from the community.
You absolutely should make good on this.
Hey, we fucked up here.
Let's find a way that makes sense here.
But a rogue actor in a company of like 150 people doing something and then you rewarding that situation only opens up the possibility for people to exploit that downstream.
That's not beneficial to anybody
sinjin i want to hear your take on this one oh you make so much sense i just don't agree
yeah this situation is quite a bit different than uh the example that tony had given and
in the one that knock had countered to in the sense that like um like the art that Tony had given and, and the one that knock it counter to in the sense that like,
um, like the art that was taken and actually had the signature of the artists, like that's how much
they had lifted it. Right. So this is like purely like, not just, you know, there's inspiration,
which, you know, every artist and every designer is going to be inspired from in the fashion
industry, other than the brand label, there's no way to copyright a dress
because it's all built on each other.
So you could, other than you could have
exactly the same design, but as long as the logo's different,
there's no way to suit in this regard, right?
Because that's just the nature of fashion.
It's the nature of inspiration.
It's the nature of artistic development's the nature of inspirations nature of artistic you know um
you know development and stuff like that but in terms of like purely as like a gaming executive
uh which i was one uh you know like i would say that the pr does matter as well right because if you catch it early and you realize this this has happened you negotiate in private and so on
and so forth but when it becomes public right right, there's, there's a couple of things there too. Cause sometimes like maybe that artist did reach out and everyone just ignored that person. Right. It's just like when you get on American airlines and you get screwed by them and then you do a social media post suddenly, instead of getting a voucher for 50 bucks, you get like a, you know, first class ticket. Right? Because there is this, uh, you know, uh, cost to the, the bad PR. Um, and I would say like, from my point of
view, I would look at it and it's like, okay, I would, I would actually, because in this case,
it was, it was pure like theft actually. And even if the, you do an audit and, uh, you know,
you see what's wrong, so you don't repeat it. The fact of the matter is, you know, you,
you fucked up and you fucked up in a very public way.
I would negotiate with the artist and see if we could keep the art in there.
If they're asking for so much, then we just say, we apologize.
It's been fixed. And then you have to kind of redo the game art.
And if they're reasonable and it makes sense and it's a good PR win. And,
you know, even if it costs a little bit more, then, you know, you pay it off and you turn it into a good spin on a story that, you know, we took out the bad actor in our company and, you know, this is not going to happen again.
And, you know, we have a very happy ending here, but I would get ahead of it as quickly as possible. possible to let something like this simmer for such a big title and for such a big investment
uh time is of the essence and to be very decisive is is very very important here one way or the other
and kind of work with it to let it sit and simmer and try to figure out internally we're going to
get back to you and while they have like egg on their face here it looks just terrible but on a
side note i know i'm going to take up a little time before team liquid got really really popular and we're in like tl.net the team liquid thing um one time this this one guy was in
our community he worked for this other company as an intern and he made his logo the team liquid
logo for like this like i don't know tech company and we found it and then we harassed the fuck out
of this company uh and we sent them emails we threatened them and then we harassed the fuck out of this company.
And we sent them emails, we threatened them and we're going to burn the place down.
How dare you take away our community logo and shit like this.
And then the, the founders said, we had no idea.
We're so sorry.
Please leave us alone.
Stop review bombing us.
We're a small company.
We had no idea.
Just leave us alone.
And so, you know, you just got to get ahead of these things.
That's an amazing anecdote.
I want to go over to Spang.
I also want to hear from Koji on this one.
He works at one of the most art driven games in all of web three,
but Spang you're up.
Yeah,
I think, I think Sinjin smashed it on the head.
I mean,
this is like the,
the real metric that I'd be like curious to see how this pans out.
It's how many people don't buy the game because of this and how bad of a taste does it leave in people's mouths?
Because they're like, oh, this is the kind of shit that Bungie is doing.
As someone who played Destiny on and off for 10 years, I'm like, oh, this is just Bungie doing their usual bullshit.
You know, like when
when Marathon launches, it will be bad. And then a year and a half after it launches, it will be
good. And then three years after it launches, it will be bad again. You know, they called Bungie
for a reason. They bounce back and forth. I hope that they, you know, are able to pull this together.
I hope that they, you know, are able to pull this together.
But at the end of the day, I don't think it's going to have,
I'm actually not sure what effect it's going to have on their sort of end line sales.
I think the state of the game will do a lot more harm than that.
But from what you were saying at the start,
it sounds like that's the real problem here is that they haven't been listening to their devs.
They haven't been communicating tightly enough with their team.
And that's how shit like this happens.
I hope the artists get this reimbursed.
But at the end of the day, game sales are what they're going to be most concerned about.
Fair to say.
Knock was hitting you with the thumbs down, though.
I want to go back to him.
And then Kevin Lambert also wants to chime in.
I was giving the thumbs down not because i
disagree i actually hope and wish that more people thought that way uh but of the lists that people
of the list of things that people are mad at bungie for this isn't even on the list right like
this is the current news cycle this is something that people will be upset about right now and when
the game gets released this will be like a footnote in the history and some weird lore
that like one or two people who want to be quirky like remember that time they stole art from this
guy like nobody gives a fuck about this long term to singen's point there's absolutely danger in the
short term and you have to navigate this correctly and if they navigate it correctly then people
really won't remember this long term but this is like fortnight fortnight stole the idea of haunted
hills from a from a creator the idea looked great the way that they brought it together which was
the location felt awesome it was like oh they're listening to the community and then they completely
fucking ignored this guy they didn't include anything about him they didn't mention the fact
that this happened and you know for a long time well for a long time for like three weeks people
gave a shit and then a new update comes out and
somebody broke a gun in the game and now it's why the fuck is the pump shotgun one-shotting people
from 15 feet away and nobody cares about haunted hills anymore of the entire list of things that
might affect sales this again is not even on the list i i will say do not underestimate the power
of reddit because those people are fucking nuts.
They'll drag you through the mud and kick you while they do it.
Their entire hobby isn't actually playing the games.
It's shitting on people that they think deserve to be shit on.
Kevin Lambert and Nikoji.
Yeah, I don't think I need to add anything much on kind of what's happening as far as like with the game the studio the public perception the sales reviews all that i like to look a little i'm looking a
little deeper at like what's actually going on and it's interesting because you know like if you look
at where bungie came from they came from like indie creative autonomy right and then they
you know part of microsoft now they're indie again, then acquired by Sony, right?
Each of those are massive shifts to their culture, right?
And now with Marathon, you know, under scrutiny and public apologies and reviews and no gameplay shown,
it's like it's kind of showing that they're under probably an internal shift that maybe they're maybe they're not quite
reflecting that bold creator first spirit that you know defined them originally you know and
it's interesting that this art thing was not caught internally i mean i don't know maybe i'm
speculating here but it might not you know there might be some creative oversight or in their
pipelines that that that didn't see this but the art director and the game director went on record personally right which you know you don't see that at big corporations so
to me that's a reflection of them trying to get back to that indie like hey we're out there we're
here we're we're listening you know they're also possibly shielding their upper execs by doing that
you know so i don't know i just i think it's interesting and might represent like
almost a little bit of an identity crisis going on as for like why this is happening
you know i just think it's interesting to analyze it from that perspective
koji i want to tag you in uh i mean i i agree with what nox said that I doubt this will affect sales at all.
It's especially early enough in the game's life cycle.
I mean, they did run some playtests, whatever, but, like, they have more than enough time to change it. I also think that for whatever reason, gamers would be angrier if there was AI art in the game as opposed to stolen art.
So there's that, too.
But, yeah, i don't know honestly i think that like
it's just flabbergasting to me that this is even possible for a company of this size in this day
and age you know like there's i personally know uh you you know somewhat tangentially but like
people who have worked on this project
and it's not a small group of people, right?
So like this has passed through many hands.
It's insane that like no one was,
I mean, I guess outside of the art team,
no one would know whether or not something was stolen.
Like if our artists took an asset
and just put it on a card, would I know?
I don't know every asset in the world, I suppose.
So like maybe that isn't the greatest argument, but don't know i think it's just crazy that like
for a company of this size they they can't uh just create all their own uh art assets i mean
we're doing it and we're not even you know a tenth the size that they are so it's like
i it just feels lazy to me i mean the game itself in general feels a little lazy to me so
whatever i'm not surprised.
Koji's over it.
The existential dread is bathing Koji right now.
Let's go over to Spang and to Lems.
Then we got to pick our MVPs.
Yeah, I was just going to put some fuel on the fire of Kevin's comment
that the Bungie has been going through it the last sort of five or so years.
Like, I remember keeping up with Destiny news.
It was always like, hey, we're going to be doing, you know, a dungeon crawler.
Oh, no, we're not doing that anymore.
Hey, we're going to be doing this kind of expansion.
Oh, no, we're not doing it anymore.
Actually, we're making this mobile game that nobody wants and all of the devs hate it.
But we're going to force them to make it, make it anyways.
And we're also going to start following devs away from Destiny 2,
despite their work not being done and putting them onto Marathon.
And if that's what Destiny has been going,
which is a live game and the focus of the company,
I mean, I don't know if that's the case anymore.
I can only imagine that with the CEO shifts that they've been undergoing,
you know, disputes with Sony on the direction to take the company, all of that stuff, I feel like
that's how you get something like this being missed is the absolute shitstorm that they've
been through. We'll end and then do a knock for the final word that we got one more really quick
topic we're going to sneak in. Yeah, just to jump off Will's point there.
I wonder, could this actually be enough of a shitstorm to be a death knell for Bungie?
Because there's been so many of these things adding up together.
Apparently, they've been laying people off.
They've been struggling with money a bit.
And then who knows how much of a rebuild this has to be.
Apparently, that art asset from like 2020 or something.
So this has literally like slipped through the cracks for literally years.
And then it's the artist herself who like sees it somewhere and she's like,
what the fuck?
Why is my shipping used?
And like without permission,
it's like,
I don't know.
Like if that,
and then the game not being good enough,
it's just like this whole shit storm together.
It's like,
I feel like that could like
snowball into a much much bigger deal unless they manage to like nip this in the bud and like get it
all figured out knock with the last word it's it didn't slip through because of a lack of process
this this like likely slipped through because it doesn't fucking matter every major top 40 artists
in the last 30 years has been
in at least one lawsuit for fucking plagiarizing somebody else's chord progression or sampling a
song without actually sampling the song. It's not 150 people who had their hands on this thing that
missed it. It's that it doesn't matter. Nike and Apple are both in current lawsuits over plagiarism.
You've had Starbucks suing every fucking coffee chain on
earth and vice versa happening to Starbucks based off of particular things that got on guests and
fucking Gucci had a lawsuit like five or six years ago where they were suing each other over patent
infringement. This is just like the cost of doing business for a lot of these public companies
or in companies who are trying to drive money to bottom lines. The reason why things like this
happen is because ultimately it does not matter.
There are never consequences for this sort of thing.
It sucks for the artists who get exploited.
But like Disney and Disney like on location
is in at least half a dozen lawsuits
that I have followed on YouTube
about a creator who had a piece of artwork
that was stolen from somebody at Disney.
They now sell it to the Disney shops.
They're not acknowledging the fact that it's him to the point where like
the piece that they are selling literally has this author or this, this artist's insignia on
the bottom of the thing that is being sold at Disney. Like they literally just ripped it
one for one. And he's been in a lawsuit for 10 years because ultimately it doesn't matter.
They have more money than you and they can run into the ground if they want to.
They should take care of it.
It's a PR issue to Sinjin's point.
I think it has potentially, you know, short-term damage.
But this idea that this might kill Bungie is so absurd to me
because in three months from now,
we're never going to even remember having this conversation on Simplified.
conversation on simplified or in cabified rather because i don't even know what fucking show them on
Or on Capified, rather.
Because I don't even know what fucking show I'm on.
we've got to go to the very last topic of the day really quick we're doing big deal
or no deal okay big deal or no deal mongrel joins openc as a global gaming ambassador if you guys
don't remember mongrel he was the person who won first place in dookie dash as an ex-fortnite pro
he also famously sold the dookie Dash key for over a million dollars.
And now he's even more integrated into Web3.
We're also doing a rally on thousands for this one, as well as a vote for the MVP.
So I need you guys to tell me if it's a big deal or no deal for OpenSea signing Mongrel.
Big deal is going to be blue.
No deal is going to be red if you're on thousands.
And then also give me your MVP vote.
We have Sinjin, Koji, Kevin Lambert,
Nock, Lems, Tony, and Spang.
Tony, I'm going to you first.
Big deal, no deal.
And who's your MVP?
Absolutely no deal.
And Kevin Lambeau Lambert is going to be my MVP.
Kevin Lambeau Lambert is going to be my MVP. Kevin Lambeau Lambert is amazing.
All right, no deal for OpenSea signing Lambert.
Maybe Kevin Lambert's getting that deal after Mongrel,
but Mongrel's the one who signed it originally.
Let's go over to Sinjin.
Sinjin, big deal or no deal for Mongrel signing to OpenSea?
Yeah, no deal.
Let that entire Dookie Dash, Hugo stuff all just die.
And no matter how much money and shots on goal
that they have you know it's not looking good at this point why be associated with it uh my
mvp is uh koji man like uh sleeve on his heart oh uh like heart on his sleeve and uh I love he's
always authentic um you know uh and that that's good that's that's really good and and knock
theft is wrong man even if the man
is fucking you fuck it man that's why we're in crypto you know fucking capitalistic pig and it's
not gonna take down bungee i agree but still you know fucking capitalistic motherfucker
um going to dub next holy i can't stand this like get your head out of your ass
and jim and tony here mongrel it's not about yuga it's they have them for open c for the games that are here now like they're not gonna go back
to fucking dookie dash dude this is for like maybe spark ball maybe wild card like i look forward to
seeing a guy at this level partnering up with a guy like oliver who knows what games to put in front of people that is mongrel's audience
like this is a freaking tag team duo coming in to take over wwe and i'm stoked for it you guys need
to just really look past your projects and the the past of of yuga because yeah yeah i'm down i'm
down with the alpha tower with uh over time yeah now now we see yeah it's two to one two people say no deal we got one saying big deal
spang over to you and who's your mvp
i i was gonna say no deal um but then i then i after like spending five minutes trying to look
him up and not being able to find it but then then I clicked the link. You sent me, Sam. And the guy's got 2.3 million followers.
And I trust the OpenSea team to not be idiots.
So I'm just going to assume that I'm the dumb one here.
And that it is a big deal.
And MVP is going to my fellow player of the gentleman's game, Sinjin.
Yeah, Mongrel with two A's might be the thing there that's tripping you up.
MVP voting is tight for now.
Let's go over to Koji, see if it stays that way.
Big deal or no deal, two to two.
Yeah, sorry.
My internet's being crazy.
It's gone in and out all day.
So if you lose me.
But I'm going to go big deal just because I love Oliver and I love OpenSea.
Those guys are awesome.
And, you know, like I didn't know this guy's name.
Obviously, I knew the Dookie Dash stuff, but, like, he's not somebody I recognize.
So I'm more apt to say no deal.
But because, you know, I like those guys and I'm going to say they don't miss, I'm voting.
Big deal.
Who's my MVP?
My MVP this week is uh i'm gonna go singin because uh i mean i i think
that we we start to take his his level of insight and his sass for granted and so he doesn't get as
many mvp votes as he probably should i don't think i've ever taken St. John's staff for granted personally,
but if you want to speak for yourself, Koji, I respect that.
I'm going to speak for everyone else.
You're too busy at the strip club, bro.
God damn it, not again.
Three to two, this being a big deal now after starting off 2-0,
a little no deal.
Knock the emperor of eSports, the man who brought home four Fortnite World Championships,
the man who has on the panel who I respect the opinion of more than anybody on this one.
Big deal or no deal for OpenSea signing Mongrel.
Before I get into that, if you're building in fucking Web3 and you constantly preach about
we need to bring on the masses and you don't know the name Mongrel, get your fucking head out of your ass man what are we talking about this guy has been
like one of the biggest creators in in fucking video games over the course of the last five years
the dude has done nothing but top fortnite leaderboards still streams to an average of
3 000 people every time he turns on twitch he He is a massive, massive creator. This isn't like some small-time deal. That being said, it's probably closer to no deal
than it is big deal for one simple reason. The amount of money that would need to be paid out
here for this to be an always-on, mongrel's going to get behind and push Web3 Gaming is so high
that not even OpenSea would be willing to pay it.
This is going to be, if I had to take a guess, a 5 to 10 stream activation over the course of the
next 12 months. It'll be exciting. It'll be great. It's going to be really good for marketing
moments. It's going to be excellent for OpenSea. Somebody coming from Magic Eden, like I have no
issue saying this. This was an incredible business move from like the
OpenSea side of things because it feels good for games. The reality of it is Mongrel only ever
played one Web3 title and it was because he could make a million and a half dollars in it and that
was significantly more than one of the peak Fortnite players at the time was ever able to
make over the course of his career. I don't think you see this type of same activation or that type of attention
matter. We saw a few people play at Dookie Dash because Mongrel wanted, but that was mostly
because it was relatively low barrier to entry. It wasn't a significant cost. I think that this is
a really good PR piece. It matters a lot to OpenSea. It'll probably mean a lot to the games that get
part. I don't want to discredit that but
i don't think that this changes anything for for web3 gaming uh one streamer even of relative
size even of his relative importance over the course of the next year or so does not really
change much for the outlook of web3 gaming breaking into the masses especially not from a guy like
mongrel i also uh in 2019 when we we were in New York for the Fortnite World Cup,
just have this memory of, to be fair, he was a fucking child at the time,
of this dude just smashing Skittles into the carpet of his hotel room,
and me and the manager from FaZe had to, like, understand,
like, speak to the fucking management, and like,
don't kick us out of the hotel room, we've got fucking 13 kids with us here.
I'll never forget that.
He's an absolute fucking little chaos monkey is the best way to describe him.
But he is a good streamer.
He is a big name.
You absolutely should know who he is.
Probably doesn't change a whole lot for Web3 Gaming.
My MVP, Sinjin.
Snuck it in at the end there.
Appreciate you also including that.
Yeah, amazing to get the direct firsthand experience.
That means we're at 3-3, though.
Big deal to no deal.
Open C's signing mongrel.
Lemz, that means you're the tiebreaker.
Which one are you taking?
Oh, man.
I wanted a little deal because we usually do big deal, little deal, no deal.
Because I was like, has he done that much?
He's just been playing Fortnite the whole time.
I don't know.
I was going to go with no deal anyway, just because it seems like, yeah,
will he actually convert that many people?
I think Noct brought up a really good point.
Like how much are they actually going to be paying him
or how long is it going to be for?
And I will default to Noct's expertise on this one
because yeah, I know who the guy is,
but I just thought he just kind of played Fortnite
and then sort of retired and then sort of didn't retire
and just played Dookie Dash
and then kind of like came and peaced out
and basically came for the paycheck and was was one of those i guess he was
the extractor that we were talking about earlier and then he got his bag and left um and my mvp
is knock even though i disagreed with him on some stuff you know it's always a good good to have you
in the panel kevin lambert i saw the hand go up don't mess up my perfect symmetry here though we
need the rally to end somewhere.
So I have to call the rally done there.
Lenz, did you say big deal or no deal?
I'm sorry.
I said no deal because I wanted to say little deal,
but you didn't give me the option, so I had to go with no deal.
All right, no deal is going to be the winner.
I'm sorry to do that to you, Kevin.
I do need to know your MVP vote of the day, though.
I'll just give my MVP, even though I somehow got left out of that call. It's fine. We'll go with Koji, because where else can
you be on a panel of game industry experts kicking in opinions on the future of gaming and the
present of gaming with so many people who have intimate knowledge of so many games,
going all the way back to classics like Mario RPG.
And I just know that in this room, if I'm like,
hey, have you guys played this? Have you guys played this?
That like me, the answer will be, yeah, of course.
Like with so many people.
So like I'd give everybody MVP if I could, but today it's Koji.
That's amazing. Koji got two votes, but Sinjin got got three that means he's getting the 60 seconds of
face time sinjin i know you have a launch coming up in thailand soon very excited for you man uh
what do you want to talk about your 60 seconds here yeah um yeah i don't want to share it anything
with uh the bad actors uh in this uh room so i'm not going to gonna say anything but if you do want to find out just join our discord
otherwise yeah I just wish everyone have a really good week and you know my heart does go out for
all the studios that are closing down and stuff like that that's always tough but I think you
know for those people who are holding on for something really amazing that they want to see in Web3.
Like, keep going for it.
You know, don't give up.
You know, make it happen.
Even if you have to pause development, that's okay.
Just, you know, keep the dream alive, guys.
Keep the dream alive.
As we know, Web3 Gaming is maybe one of the hardest industries on earth to actually make it work on a long time horizon.
So mad respect to all the studios that try their best to act ethically, to build cool things, to push the industry forward.
That means a ton to all of us here, whether or not they're successful.
Honestly, as long as you're not a straight up scammer, you're good in my book.
Thank you for trying to do cool things. We know it's not always going to work out but we really appreciate you
i have to give a big shout out to all of our amazing sponsors of course avalanche the official
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And we're here live in London at the summit.
Literally 45 minutes away is the Bergerton Castle that we've all been hanging out at all day.
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It's Game 7, the official infrastructure of Gamified. Go grab your game pads and get ready to conquer the next era of gaming.
And today, we of course had Dub playing
Farcade games on thousands.tv while we did gamified. Thank you everybody for participating in the chaos.
Sorry if it was a little bit hectic between having one laptop to manage like four different things
and also live streaming on thousands for the first time. It was a little less organized than I
typically would like, but with that being said, I think we still had a lot of fun, had some really
interesting discussions. You can make your own game development dreams come through by offering a we're offering a
no code solution to building games to developing games and distributing your own creations thanks
to the farcade and thank you to thousands.tv for giving away five hundred dollars in wolf
via the wolves down five hundred dollars in gun via off the grid that was all possible thanks to
thousands.tv that That's going to
go to some of the top scorers and people that were participating in rallies throughout the episode.
It was a blast to live stream along with you guys really, really appreciate being included in this
and can't wait to do it again soon in the future. We'll be back same time, same place. I'll be in
Salt Lake again, uh, back in my dojo, so to speak at 4 PM Eastern next week. And of course, join us
for simplified 4 PM Eastern on every single Monday with me,
Nock, and Big Bro Matt.
Thanks again, guys, for tuning in.
And thanks to all of our amazing panelists.
Sinjin from Meiji, Koji from Parallel, Kevin Lambert from Project O, Nock from Magic Eden,
Lems from Cypress, Tony V from Glitter Cloud Solutions, Spang from AVAX, and also Dub from Glitter Cloud Solutions.
The Glitter Cloud boys always making it happen on the shows.
We'll see you next week.
Thanks, guys. .
